


A Series Of Observations On The Superhuman Psyche

by tentacledicks



Category: Original Work
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, POV Second Person, Shapeshifting, Superpowers, Therapy, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:35:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23074084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: It's a curious thing, being the lone therapist in a state to specialize in superhuman counseling. Your practice ranges from the mundane venting of a college student with heightened reflexes to the extraordinary outbursts of a telepath capable of melting minds. There's no one else that can do the job quite like you do.Somehow, in the end, they're always just people.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	A Series Of Observations On The Superhuman Psyche

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashglory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashglory/gifts).



> I had a blast thinking of different little scenarios to chuck into this bit. I could probably _keep_ thinking up scenarios to chuck in, but I started running out of good titles for Medium articles and figured I was maybe getting away from myself there.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!!

Your first client of the day is a young man named Anthony Caruso, also known to the public as Blaze. To the press, his adoring fans, and most people he meets, he’s a bombastic, energetic extrovert, eager to make friends and dole out inspirational quotes. He is a media darling with an unimpeachable reputation—an impressive feat, considering the destructive nature of his superpowers. There’s rumors that the local League chapter is planning to make him team leader when old Ironskin finally retires.

He is very quiet right now, staring at his gloved hands. The journal you’ve asked him to keep sits on the edge of your desk, and you’ve read the most recent entries with his permission. Sometimes it’s easier to put things to paper than to say them out loud.

You’re very proud of him for daring to do even that much, and make a point to tell him this at the end of every session.

“I read an article the other day,” you say conversationally, knowing that he won’t speak otherwise, “that there’s some evidence that superhumans are resistant to cancer. It’s preliminary right now, and they haven’t fully accounted for other risk factors, but it’s an interesting hypothetical.”

Anthony looks up, a wry twist to his lips. “Well, I’d like it if my hands didn’t fall off from lymphoma or whatever.”

His gloves are lined with asbestos. It’s not a League mandate, despite the fact that most people assume it is, but their assumptions aren’t unreasonable. Destructive superhumans often have much more rigid expectations assigned to them, though the expectations stopped just short of regulations most of the time. It’s easier for Anthony to let people think it a League issue rather than a self-imposed stricture.

“You’ve been writing a lot more recently,” you observe, the ice broken now. “Is it helping?”

“Uhm.” He waffles for a bit before reluctantly saying, “Yeah, a bit. I like it better than the worksheets, and sometimes I just use it for… whatever.”

His grocery list is two pages past a self-loathing scrawl. You understand what he means.

Getting Anthony to lower his barriers has been a task of three years now. He’s been a good sport about most of your requests and assignments, but that isn’t the same as opening up. You’ve yet to hear the story out of his own mouth, only seen the passionless police reports that the League provided when they recommended Anthony into your care. Because you respect his desire for the illusion of privacy, you’ve refrained from parroting the events back to him.

For the time being, you can work around the edges of his trauma.

“Hey,” he says abruptly, cutting himself off midway through a retelling of a recent emergency he’d aided with. “Do you—you know what happened when I was a kid, right?”

“I have it in your file, yes.” There’s only one thing he could mean by ‘when I was a kid’, because his childhood had been, if not idyllic, happy enough prior to the manifestation of his powers. An involuntary reaction to stress. Not well studied enough to know the exact mechanics behind it, though that wasn’t for lack of funding or interest. Cases like Anthony’s were the extreme end and more noteworthy because of it. Most highschool students didn’t burn down their houses because of finals, especially not in their sleep.

“Am I some kind of hypocrite for pretending to be a hero?” _Because I’m a murderer_ , is what he doesn’t say. That is one of those edges you’ve been carefully working your way in towards, peeling apart the doubt and blame.

It’s not the same as him telling you the story, but it is permission for you to address the facts. You consider your words carefully before saying, “You are a hero, Anthony. You’ve saved dozens of lives with your own hands, and hundreds more with the safety testing you’ve helped with. The accident isn’t enough to erase that.”

He starts to sneer, the automatic self-recrimination warring against his desire to believe you, but loses the expression to one of exhaustion instead. He hasn’t been sleeping well. You hope the League isn’t pushing him too hard.

“It’s just that sometimes I think…” He swallows, looks down at his gloved hands again. “I think, I wonder if my dad would be proud of me, and then I remember that I shouldn’t even pretend like he would. I mean. I’m the one that killed them. Why would they ever be proud of me?”

“It was an accident,” you repeat, leaning across your desk. “Your father was a first responder too, Anthony. I think he’d be very proud of the lives you’ve saved.”

He doesn’t say anything else in the ten minutes you have left.

* * *

>   
> ...Which of course brings us to the question: what does it mean to be superhuman?
> 
> A layman might look towards their comic books for answers, that refuge of the absurd that has become prophetic for our modern times. An expert might look at the various studies, both rigorous and otherwise, trying to nail down the phenomenon with ever more unique cases coming to their attention. But are either of these a good place to look? Are they truly describing a ‘superhuman’, or do they merely outline the edges of a kind of ‘different human’?
> 
> Consider the Olympics: an event staged every two years to highlight that peak physical conditioning of the human body. There is a sense that not just anyone can become one of these athletes, the best of the best, and even the worst performing competitors are far beyond the abilities of the average person. And yet, in most studies of the superhuman phenomenon, these individuals aren’t considered part of that unique demographic. Why?
> 
> Even the term ‘superhuman’ itself is born out of a set of assumptions, normalcy and extraordinary ability, feats of incredible power painted in magenta ink across comic book pages. If we consider that our ideas of ‘superhumanity’ are influenced by the fantasies we built over the last eighty years, is it such a shock that the more and more of these activated individuals, these ‘superhumans’, are equally influenced?
> 
> It begs consideration, the assumption that the superhuman plague is a plague at all. As vivid and horrible a picture the media may paint of this minute population now, we must remember that it is a tiny fraction of a percentage of the population. Humanity has always had its demigods, its freakshows; can we truly say that the surge of superhumans now is unique? Or is it only that our expectations shape the way these individuals, these heroes and villains splashed gaudy across shock pieces and tabloids, view themselves?...

— G.H. Keller, _The Modern Myth: Evidence of Superhumans Across History_

* * *

Annette Livington is the most beautiful model to go unrecognized by the masses.

She sits on the leather couch in a designer outfit, blouse and purple slacks tailored to custom fit her body. It is a different body from the one she’d had when you first took her on as a client, lean and elegant and several inches taller, but the differences had been so subtle at first that you hadn’t recognized them. Not until you’d compared her against her earlier work in fashion magazines.

You consider the ruby red hair and lean, angular face, currently in trend. Annette is one of the most in-demand models for a reason, even when she isn’t subconsciously matching the demands of the industry. There are a number of reasons for that, but that’s not a subject you think will get much attention today.

Today, Annette is focused on her social media manager, raging about his incompetence and twisting her lovely features into something altogether more ugly. Her mouth distorts further than a human’s mouth rightly should, hair twisting and coiling like snakes around her shoulders, and you note the way color flashes through it even though she is so very careful to keep that shade of red as her base. It had taken a long time for her to get comfortable enough with you that she would even show this much loss of control.

You ask, gently, about the crux of the issue. As always, Annette’s self-image is a fragile, precarious thing. She does not take the question well.

But this is something you’re used to, the hysterics and the anxieties, and you weigh her outbursts here against the history you’re familiar with. Obviously, you do not work with her, or her social media manager, and you have only her word to go by—but Annette is not, as some of your colleagues have claimed, consumed with an intractable personality disorder. She benefits from cognitive behavioral therapy, but the root of her anxieties is easy to hunt out, if not easy to approach. You think that the stigma attached to that sort of diagnosis would do her more ill than good.

You also think that there may be a kernel of truth in her ranting.

As furious as she is with you, she grudgingly allows you to ask further probing questions. In the beginning, when Annette was careful to keep her shape to the most aesthetically pleasing one possible, you had to be careful with your approach; it’s not that she lies out of malice or anger, but she protects herself in the best way she can. For Annette, the worst possible fate is to be seen, known, perceived in all her imperfections. That she trusts you enough to see her self-determined ugliness is both a tentative step forward towards getting better, and a constant, eternal test of when she will go too far and you will reject her too.

Patiently, you do not reject her. But you do suggest she talk to her modeling agency and ask them for a different manager. If this one is fundamentally misrepresenting her, she is likely to seize control of her accounts all over again, and you’re aware enough of her work to know that the agency would prefer she not do that.

Annette considers it. At some point in the session, she’d lost inches, gone blonde again, ill-fitting in her tailored outfit. You know she will fix it before she leaves, but you only catch rare glimpses of her in this particular shape.

There are no photos from her childhood prior to the development of her powers. You think that this might also be a test of trust.

* * *

>   
> ...Into this confusing mess of ethics, responsibilities, and rights to privacy, comes Marika Amashukeli.
> 
> She’s one of the highest paid consultants in the agricultural industry. While her peers have degrees in genetics and environmental science, Marika admits that her focus was political science. In a pair of smart jeans and a pink plaid shirt, she gives off the impression of country girl aesthetics without the commitment; her boots are the only piece of her outfit that look authentic, with lingering soil under the soles.
> 
> “I try to fit in, but you have to pick between sensible clothes and suits,” she explains, her tanned hands wrapped around a six dollar latte. “The bigger companies, the ones leading in technology to make growing food easier, they want blouses and pencil skirts. But farmers don’t trust that, and they’re the ones I have to think about the most.”
> 
> There’s a hint of wry self-deprecation in Marika’s smile, an invitation to join in on the joke. This wasn’t the career path she’d ever considered. But Marika, who asks to be on a first name basis with everyone she meets, has something none of her colleagues can match.
> 
> She can talk to plants. And it turns out that they have a lot of interesting things to say.
> 
> “We know how to measure soil quality. We know how to account for rainfall, for fertilizer, for temperature and sunlight. When we get floods in flat areas that supply most of the wheat to the the global market, that’s a big deal, but it’s a big deal we understand. I’m not really saying anything we didn’t already know.” She takes a sip from her latte and crosses her fashionable boots at the heel.
> 
> In this, Marika is correct. After all, her colleagues are much more learned in those areas than she is. She admits, without shame, how often she relies on their research for her own work.
> 
> “The real thing I bring to the table is telling all that to the plants themselves. Every cultivar has a slightly different language, different needs, some of them are more open to change, some aren’t—and it’s not just the plants themselves, it’s the people that raise them.”
> 
> I ask her if they think the way we do, and if she’s experienced pushback from others in the industry on that point. She frowns, but considers my question from every angle. When she thinks, she taps her fingers to the beat of _Bohemian Rhapsody_.
> 
> “They don’t,” she says eventually, but it’s not the decisive answer she thinks I’m expecting. “They do think, but not in a way that humans can really understand. It’s almost like trying to talk in pure stimulus. I can explain what’s happening and why, but there’s a language barrier compounded by the way humans think. Plants don’t have the same sense of time that we do.”
> 
> Is that why she grew a pecan tree in her neighborhood overnight?
> 
> Marika laughs. “Oh god, that was a mistake. I really didn’t mean to.”...

— Medium.com, _The Co-op Queen Who’s Revolutionizing Big Agriculture_

* * *

Unlike most of your clients, Dr. Medina sprawls back on the leather couch in your office, her head propped up on a throw pillow and her ankles crossed on the opposite arm. She’s a tiny woman, and it is a tiny couch. Like every session, you begin it by reminding her that people usually sit there.

She laughs. “Of course they do. I trust in your ability to wipe the sofa down.”

“You trust me too much,” you tell her, but it is with some degree of fondness.

Vanessa is a colleague of yours, but you would not consider her a friend. It’s for the best, because that careful distance is important when she’s also a client, seeking you out for counseling. You are a comforting presence in your office, but she has told you that you’re deeply unsettling outside of that context. It’s not a statement that’s meant hurtfully, and you don’t take it as anything other than fact.

She is not the first superhuman to tell you this.

You specialize in this field for a reason; while Vanessa could go to anyone else to help ease the burden of her profession, you are the only licensed therapist in the state that focuses on superhumans. The unique way various individuals present their powers is often deeply tied to the stressors that initially provoked them, and that is where you come in.

By her own assessment, Vanessa first manifested her empathetic reading around puberty. She was the eldest of six, with a mother who more often acted as a seventh child rather than a parental figure. In that unhappy circumstance she was forced to be an adult well before her time and thus developed an uncanny ability to divine the emotions and intentions of others. As powers go, it’s a subtle one; had she herself not taken an interest in the medical field, it’s possible it would never have been discovered.

As a psychologist, she’s one of the best for handling troubled children and abuse victims. As an empath, you know that the effort is agonizing at times.

Some days, you talk. Some days, she does. Yours is a professional relationship, but you let her guide the direction of the sessions. And some days, like this one, she shuts her eyes and lays on the couch, basking in the perfect silence of your mind.

You don’t begrudge her the refuge. You’re not so different, the two of you.

* * *

>   
> MADISON, Georgia — Early Sunday morning, Georgia State Patrol apprehended a suspect in the ongoing investigation of a string of break ins. Members of the community had complained for weeks about a serial prowler walking through their homes close to midnight, but there had been little response from the police until the most recent incident.
> 
> Part of the slow response was due to the difficulty in proving these events occurred. There were no signs of breaking and entering, and few residents of the county had cameras inside their homes to record the prowler. Late Friday night, a resident finally captured video of the break in, leading to the arrest. In the recording, the prowler can be seen teleporting into the bedroom of the resident, who was streaming at the time, before navigating out towards the kitchen. A second recording, from the resident’s phone, shows the prowler upending pots and pans before disappearing again.
> 
> The suspect, whose name and age have been withheld, is a student at Morgan County High School. They had complained of sleep disturbances in the years prior and had been part of two sleep studies prior to the last few months. In a press release, the Madison County Sheriff assured residents that precautions were being taken, but that they were considering their options before pressing charges.

— _Associated Press_ , ‘Georgia State Patrol arrests superhuman serial prowler’

* * *

The clock reads 3:48, sitting on your desk at an angle that provides you the time without pressuring your clients to focus on when the session will end.

Zachariah Meyer fidgets, opens his mouth, closes it again. Twists his fingers so taut that they might break and can’t get the words out for almost two minutes. You don’t mean to time him, but this is your third session, and you can’t help but watch the clock now.

The clock reads 3:48.

Zachariah Meyer gathers his courage and answers your mild query about his week, a frantic tumble of words that is as incoherent as it is revealing. The heinous amounts of stress he’s been under drove him to finally, fearfully make an appointment with you on the recommendation of a friend. He is crippled with terror, of himself and of the prospect of failure, and that terror comes out in a flood of half-formed sentences that stutter and stumble as he tries to fit a hundred different answers into the space of one.

By the time he actually stops to breathe, almost seven minutes have passed, you waiting patiently for him to reach a natural stopping point. Before you can ask another question, one more specific, he blanches white and apologizes.

The clock reads 3:48.

Zachariah Meyer says, “It’s been a bit stressful.” You’ve just asked him how his week has been, and you suppose that this is not _untrue_ but also evidence of his tendency to self-edit as much as possible to avoid being a burden. It has not escaped your notice that the anxious ones are least likely to ask for your help despite often needing it as much, or more than, some of your other clients.

“More than a bit stressful, it sounds,” you say, doing your best not to force the issue. If you apply too much pressure, he’ll panic again. “Is there anything specific that you want to talk about?”

He opens his mouth, but what tumbles out is a series of apologies for not knowing where to start. You have no chance to reassure him.

The clock reads 3:48.

Zachariah Meyer tells you, in response to your question, “Work has been eating me up lately, and I’m not sure I can handle this job. I know I need to work, but I keep making mistakes, and I’m certain that everyone’s sick of me by now. I should be able to _do_ these things by now!”

That, finally, is something you can approach with a little more candor. “Has your boss said anything about your performance? Everyone makes mistakes in the first few months, and this is your first job out of college.”

He wrings his hands, but seems willing to stay in this timeline for now. “Well no, obviously, but I can _tell_ I’m messing up. It’s just—well, I can’t seem to stop messing up. Every time I fix a problem, it turns out I’ve made ten more.”

“You don’t have to be perfect,” you tell him. He won’t let you refer him to a psychiatrist for anti-anxiety medication, but you think it would go a long way towards fixing that desperate need for perfectionism.

“But I do,” he says miserably, his nails biting into his own skin. “No, wait, this was a mistake to mention—”

The clock reads 3:48. 

Zachariah Meyer tries to give a noncommittal reply, having trained himself out of external displays of panic by this repetition. It’s frustrating, but you know what he’s like by now—you can’t afford to show that frustration. Most people wouldn’t remember the skips backwards, but you are not most people.

“I think we should keep talking about your concerns at work,” you tell him, rather than acknowledging the brushoff he gives you. He blanches again, too startled to remember what you told him during your introductory session.

You do not sigh. You keep your expression non-judgemental and your voice even and warm.

“I remember every time you jump back,” you remind him. “You haven’t made any mistakes at all. This is a safe space for you to speak your mind; therapy isn’t a task that you’re supposed to complete perfectly the first time.”

“ _Everything_ is,” he says, which is the closest he has come to admitting that his fear of failure drives his control over the flow of time.

“There’s no wrong answers. If you don’t want to talk about work right now, we can focus on something else, but I do think that we should discuss it.”

He looks miserable, but the clock reads 3:52. Progress.


End file.
